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Tuning the developing brain to emotional body expressions

Manuela Missana1, Anthony P Atkinson, Tobias Grossmann

  • 1Early Social Development Group, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.

Developmental Science
|July 22, 2014
PubMed

Insights

Infants develop sensitivity to emotional body language between 4 and 8 months. Eight-month-olds, unlike 4-month-olds, showed distinct brain responses to the orientation and emotion of body expressions.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental psychology
  • Cognitive neuroscience
  • Social cognition

Background:

  • Recognizing emotional body expressions is a crucial social skill for adults.
  • The developmental timeline for infants' sensitivity to bodily expressed emotions remains unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate when infants become sensitive to emotional body expressions.
  • To examine brain responses to dynamic body expressions in infants.

Main Methods:

  • Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in 4- and 8-month-old infants.
  • Infants viewed point-light displays (PLDs) of happy and fearful body expressions in upright and inverted orientations.

Main Results:

  • Eight-month-olds, but not 4-month-olds, exhibited sensitivity to expression orientation and emotion.
  • An early frontal/central positivity (200-400 ms) indicated orientation sensitivity in 8-month-olds.
  • A late right-hemisphere temporoparietal positivity (700-1100 ms) indicated emotion sensitivity in 8-month-olds.

Conclusions:

  • Distinct orientation-sensitive and emotion-sensitive brain processes emerge between 4 and 8 months of age.
  • These findings highlight critical developmental changes in infant social perception.

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